**Google AI’s AlphaFold predicts the structure of nearly every known protein**
**Breakthrough will accelerate drug discovery and provide insights into fundamental biology**
Today, we’re releasing the structure of nearly every protein made by the human body, predicted by our AlphaFold system. This represents a major advance in biology, providing the scientific community with a powerful new tool for studying and understanding the molecular basis of life.
Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, carrying out a vast array of tasks that are essential for life. Their function is determined by their three-dimensional structure, which in turn is determined by the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. Until now, scientists could only determine the structure of a protein by painstakingly crystallizing it or by using expensive and time-consuming techniques like cryo-electron microscopy.
AlphaFold predicts the structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence alone, without the need for any experimental data. This is a major breakthrough, as it means that scientists can now quickly and easily determine the structure of any protein, including those that are difficult or impossible to crystallize or visualize using other techniques.
The release of the human proteome is a major milestone in the development of AlphaFold. It represents the culmination of years of research and development, and it provides the scientific community with a powerful new tool for studying and understanding the molecular basis of life. We believe that this breakthrough will have a major impact on drug discovery, as it will allow scientists to quickly and easily identify new drug targets and develop new drugs that are more effective and less likely to cause side effects.
**How AlphaFold works**
AlphaFold is a deep learning system that was trained on a massive dataset of protein structures and amino acid sequences. The system learns to identify the patterns that determine the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. Once AlphaFold has been trained, it can predict the structure of any protein from its amino acid sequence alone.
**The impact of AlphaFold**
The release of the human proteome is a major breakthrough in biology. It provides the scientific community with a powerful new tool for studying and understanding the molecular basis of life. We believe that this breakthrough will have a major impact on drug discovery, as it will allow scientists to quickly and easily identify new drug targets and develop new drugs that are more effective and less likely to cause side effects.
**In addition to drug discovery, AlphaFold can be used to:**
* Study the molecular basis of disease
* Design new enzymes and other proteins with useful properties
* Understand the evolution of proteins
* Develop new materials and devices
**We believe that AlphaFold is a major step forward in our understanding of the molecular basis of life. We are excited to see how the scientific community uses this new tool to make new discoveries and develop new technologies.**
[Read the full article on the DeepMind website](https://deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-predicts-structure-nearly-every-known-protein).
